#geonarrative

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Assessment 3: Geo-Narrative

Assessment 3: Production Project

Geo-Narrative Rationale

For assessment 3 for the Networked Media Production Unit, I decided on the geo-narrative option as it complimented and expanded upon the body of work that I was already undertaking as part of my blog in assessment 2.

My blog was dedicated to my walking travels around Richmond with my two dogs, so I thought it would be perfect to be able to show some of these posts on a map for visitors to find for themselves.

Richmond, once a working class suburb is now quite a culturally diverse and interesting suburb, so I found there were a number of ways I could approach this project from a geo-narrative perspective. I considered a range of other options such as ‘Fit in Richmond’ highlighting all of the fun physical activities to do, or ‘Out and About in Richmond’ showcasing all of the popular café’s, pubs and restaurants.  I even mocked them up on a map to test them out. 

I also did quite a bit of searching through Tumblr to see if any other bloggers were documenting the area and to see what they were doing.  I discovered that I was the only person exploring this subject, so in the end I wanted to show visitors a side to Richmond that they wouldn’t already know and share some of its hidden treasures.

As I had quite a lot of images collected, the list of possibilities to include on this map was quite long. As the brief limited the entries to 10-12 images, I decided to choose my 4 favourite images from each of the following headings:

1.     Typography

Royston Hotel

Baby Pizza

Rowena Heights

Space

2.     Street Art

Richmond Tiger

Botherambo Street

Number 8

Type

3.     Richmond Icons

Dimmeys Clock

Nylex Clock

Skipping Girl Vinegar

St Ignatius Church

Once I’d made this decision, my next step was to mark out all of the features on a map with a pen and paper to see how it all flows.  I then transferred these markers onto Google Maps using the ‘My Places’ feature.

I then spent quite a bit of time learning and discovering how to create custom markers for my map as I wanted the photograph of each location to be the visual marker.  I created all of my markers in Photoshop, and that was where the fun began…

Technical difficulties

At first I encountered some rather difficult issues uploading my custom icons to the map.  After much research and testing, I finally was able to resolve the issue using a combination of Google products: Google Picasa, Google Chrome and Google Maps.  Picasa was used to host the custom markers online after creation and Chrome was used as the browser that would enable the upload.

Previously I had tried hosting the markers on a number of sites including my personal website, facebook, dropbox, flickr and eventually (and successfully) using Picasa.  The in-text images weren’t a problem and were hosted on my personal web site.

If this failed, I had also research a back-up option that Google provides - a range of pre-designed markers.  In the end I did not need to go down this path (http://code.google.com/p/google-maps-icons/wiki/CultureIcons )

Being able to select a topic that complimented my blog (assessment 2), I found that I was able to embrace a range of technologies to share my information ie. Google Maps, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

The full version of the map is available online at: https://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?msid=215440534782052593721.0004dcf64f47d5dca9a68&msa=0&ll=-37.821819,145.007558&spn=0.029052,0.066047

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Geo-narrative Rationale

For the production project I decided to do a geo-narrative. I chose a geo-narrative because I thought it would be a fun and interesting way to tell a story. I based my geo-narrative on a trip I took with family friends to America 18 months ago. I thought this would be a fun topic and would be a cool vestige of our holiday that I could keep and share with the people I went with. I decided to write the narrative in third person and do it in a storybook ‘once upon a time’ style because I thought this would make the story more interesting. I used Google to search for and look at Geo-narratives from previous semesters to get an idea of the Geo-narrative. I saw one that was also a travel geo-narrative written in third person and I really liked how it was done and so I decided I would use a similar style in creating my own Geo-narrative.

I placed markers at all the main places we visited and drew lines that connected our flights between airports. I tried to make the marker placements as accurate as possible by searching for the places where I wanted to position them. I also thought it was really cool how you can see a satellite view of the places where the markers are and this worked well with incorporating the photos I had taken. For example with the marker at the Pearl Harbour memorial you can actually see the outline of the ship under the water from the ariel satellite view and then the accompanying images show the memorial as viewed from ground level. For the flights I used the flight image marker. I used pin markers to mark the places we visited. I also marked a line along the road along which we travelled between Anaheim and Las Vegas which shows the distance and time travelled between places.

I wrote a small paragraph of text on each marker that tells the story. I also used images I had taken during the trip to help convey the story. For some of the images I used Photoshop to combine several pictures together to create an image that would better complement the story. After I had finished editing the photos I uploaded them to image hosting site PhotoBucket so I could then use the URL to display them on my geo-narrative. I used html to adjust all of the images to make them 420 pixels wide so they would fit well into the display window on the Google map markers and I wanted them all to be a consistent size.

I also used links to relevant content on external websites on some of the markers to make the narrative even more networked and interesting. Some are links to websites with information about the different areas and some are relevant youtube videos. I also included some links to news events that happened at the time in the locations we were at. I think this makes it more networked because it ties in other events that happened in the area around the same time.

It was really fun looking back over the photos from my trip and creating them into a narrative of our trip. It was also really interesting to see how the images, text, and links attached to different locations in Google maps creates a network of information that tells a story. I really enjoyed this project and am happy with the final result of my geo-narrative.

You can view my geonarrative here.